Universal Control Groups: The Path to Digital Marketing Measurement Clarity

If you truly want to know the impact your digital marketing campaigns are having, then compare the actions of people who get them to the actions of people who wanted to get them but didn’t. That’s the logic behind universal control groups, which is a measurement approach where you exclude a small portion of your audience from campaigns to get a baseline for measuring their impact over time.

By withholding campaigns from people who would normally receive them, brands are able to control for level of interest and intent in a way that you couldn’t if you simply compared people who got the campaign to people who weren’t eligible to get them. That’s why many consider universal control groups to be the purest way to measure the lift generated by your marketing efforts.

However, implementing a universal control group involves some complexity. In this post, Oracle Marketing Consulting’s Peter Briggs and Tommy Hummel discuss the various issues so you can do one successfully.

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog